Believing child sexual abuse claims

Feb. 13, 2007

A University of Oregon study has found that

·          young men who have never been traumatized are least likely to believe a person’s recounting of child sexual abuse.

·          males with highly sexist beliefs also tend to believe that such incidents, if they happened at all, were not harmful to the victim.

There are two forms of disbelief

·          One is that such things never happen – similar to denying the Holocaust occurred.

·          A second is that no one is harmed – that kids are sexual beings who sometimes experiment with grownups, which feeds into widely held mythology.

It is important to study the factors that may explain why some people don’t believe that such abuses occur, a phenomenon that discourages victims from speaking out and allows perpetrators to escape unpunished and possibly repeat such crimes.

The biggest obstacle to addressing CSA, is an unwillingness to talk about it, and this is very much related to people’s unwillingness to believe that it occurs and is so problematic.

Until we change societal attitudes, abuse victims are less likely to speak up. It means that abuse can keep occurring to them, and that they won’t get the societal support they need. It’s positive social support and being believed that is most likely leading to positive mental health outcomes.

In the study, 318 university students were divided into two groups based on self-reporting of abuse history and sexist attitudes. Both groups heard short vignettes in which a male or female described an incident that occurred at age 9 involving an adult figure. The victim in each case also reported whether the memory has always been available to recall since the incident or was recently recalled.

Females, including those who had and had not suffered from some kind of betrayal of adult trust, and males who had experienced such betrayal all were willing to believe such an allegation, even more so in the cases where memory had always been present. There was a dramatic decline in believability for men with no abuse history. This was a very big effect with a major difference between males and females.

The findings suggest that educational efforts may need to be more heavily focused toward men to help them understand that such acts do occur and that the abuse causes long lasting damage.  

http://www.uoregon.edu/newsstory.php?a=2.13.07-disbelievers.html